It’s the middle of spring break week. I’m totally out of laundry. Today once again I feel inhuman, like an absolute foreigner to, or exile from, society. I know I am different and it pains me but there’s little I can do but keep walking and wondering what it’s like to think of yourself as more or less like everyone else.

I hate feeling like this. Not an absolutely spectacular morning, really. But I suppose life is dangerous, always.

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I’ve been fighting with myself all morning, to no effect other than the wanton consumption of time and energy. I think I have managed to engineer a few hundred extra dollars into the equation for the next few months. That is at least something, though among other things it will mean an end (an unexpectedly quick one) to these blog posts by phone.

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It’s taking all I’ve got today to go in to work. I don’t feel particularly well but that’s nothing—the thing that’s getting to me is the loss of the possibility of the morning. Today I really want and need that expansive feeling that comes from the knowledge that today is anything I want it to be. This stands in stark contrast to being at work all morning and knowing that by the time I leave, the day will no longer be young at all.

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In other years it would be about now that I’d start re-engineering the website here for the following year. I don’t think I’m gonna do that anymore though—at least not for a while.

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A giant drop of water just fell on my screen. Here, in the subway tunnel. I think New York is the drippiest (or is it leakiest?) city I’ve ever been to.

Some guy is playing smooth cocktail jazz on a ukelele in the area of the station between platforms. It doesn’t sound bad at all.

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Right now even though I must look a fool walking around punching keys on this tiny phone I absolutely can’t stop. I feel as though if I end this entry I’ll disappear from the universe. I suppose that’s the need to be perpetually connected to the network—to the collective—that used to haunt me when I was younger. It’s like I don’t fit comfortably into sociality anywhere as a human, but I can function okay as a node.

Most people don’t have any idea that long before dynamic IP assignments the Internet was populated entirely by well-defined, fully elaborated nodes that could be communicated with using dozens of protocols that trafficked in many kinds of data and various relationships to temporality, giving each node much more the quality of an avatar than a network fragment.